


always make two cups of tea

by oonaseckar



Category: IT Crowd
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Apocalypse, Brains, Foot Fetish, M/M, Shoes, THE SHOES, Tea, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies, zombie invasion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-23
Updated: 2015-05-23
Packaged: 2018-03-31 18:42:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3988645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oonaseckar/pseuds/oonaseckar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Up in Reynholm Industries, and out into the real world, there's a zombie invasion.  Down in the basement, life continues as normal for our heroes.  Well, after a fashion.</p><p>For doreyg's prompt <i>'Time for you and time for me,</i><br/>And time yet for a hundred indecisions<br/>And for a hundred visions and revisions<br/>Before the taking of a toast and tea.'<br/>in the Obscure & British Commentfest 2015.</p>
            </blockquote>





	always make two cups of tea

**Author's Note:**

> Title is an IT Crowd quote. References to Lord of the Flies and Yeats' 'The Second Coming'.

“The zombies are at the door, Roy! What the flip we gonna do?”

The basement is on lockdown, not that that's much comfort. Not when the brains-hungry shambling dead have finally reached the ground floor, and are seeking whom they may devour. Down in their lair, Roy and Moss can hear the knocking on the pipes, the shuffling in the (completely manual, what century is this again?) service lift. The creaking, as they crowd up against the reinforced glass of the exterior stairwell. They can – even here – hear the moans.

It's not an unreasonable question, but still it seems to fluster Roy a bit. “Google it, Moss!” might be his instinctive answer, but not an option. The lecky's still on – who knows for how long – but the internet is down. The servers in Zurich were the first to go: an internet based zombie virus transferring into wetworks reality, subliminal messages nudging DNA transcription machinery to subtly reselect stretches of code, opening up coiled and twisted loops of genome that hadn't been translated for an eon or two. Including viral DNA, and see what one little antique virus can do. What will eventually kill the human race? The internet, maybe. Its proudest possession, why not? Jen didn't, after all, manage to break the internet. But possibly, the internet has broken us.

He stands helpless in the middle of the room, hands slack at his sides, looking about him for an answer. That's when order and method save him, when plans and ticky-sheets and supergeek-system come to the rescue. Because they've already planned for exactly this eventuality. He remembers the idle afternoon, when they'd tired of playing darts with a clip of Douglas from his 2011 muscleman calendar, and decided instead to begin writing the...

“The Super-Detailed All-Eventualities Zombie Emergency Handbook! That's what we need, Moss! Where did you put it?”

Even with imminent dismemberment threatened, he has to allow Moss a moment or two, to scoff at the idea of having created a wire-o bound hard copy of anything. (Although now, when they're lucky to have the lecky on for every minute longer that it lasts, it doesn't sound such an antiquated and ludicrous idea.) Then they leap for the nearest monitor, and seconds later they're scrolling through expert opinion on how to deal with a raging zombie attack.

Well, their own opinion. But given this is the first real-life zombie attack, they're as much expert as anyone, probably.

Moss's agonized wail goes up thirty seconds later. “We didn't revise the Weapons section, Roy! We were going to revise the Weapons section – up from baseball bats and throwing staplers – but we didn't! Why didn't we revise the Weapons section, Roy?”

Roy slumps back, foozled. “Yeah, well, Moss, it would have been nice to have something in the Vaccinations and Treatments section, barring a placeholder cutout gif of Reynholm Denholm's head stuck on a Betty Boop body, sticking its arse out and wiggling. Maybe we couldn't decide what to put in there at the time – or agree – but we should have gone back to it before now. This was eighteen months back, Moss! Fuck, I need tea.”

But right then there's an ominous thud in the lift outside – which is wedged shut, and stuck on the ground via a bit of macgyvering with duct tape, swiss army knife and eight thousand unsold copies of their ill-fated sexy geek calendar. And Moss drags him back into his chair, just as he makes as if to stand in search of caffeine and heat and escape. “You're bonkers out of your tiny cranium on the slow donkey to Crazytown, Roy! You think we got time for _camellia sinensis_? We haven't even got time to pronounce it! Apply your arse to your chair and let's brainstorm a solution to this not-alive-not-dead-hello-mister-colleague-you-look-tasty knotty issue!”

And as he says it, even through the internal door Moss hears a particularly nasty, vehment and intentional thud from inside the lift. Neither he nor Roy are sure exactly how many of their ex-colleagues managed to wander in there and accidentally hit the right button to bring them down here. But they're keeping Moss and Roy a sinister kind of company, and it's only a matter of time before random hammering results in them hitting the right button to open the doors. Which is why he and Roy have the doors barricaded. 

But they've seen a lot of zombie flicks, and their hopes are not high. 

So they work their way through the revisions and elaborations that they should really have got to some time before in these last eighteen months. Because you just never know when there's gonna be a sudden zombie outbreak. As now proved. 

Hammering out the details, expanding on placeholders and hastily sketched-out paragraphs, they search for clues to effective treatments and reliable defence against the fleshy and moaning undead. They read with hungry attention to detail, they debate – bicker – about contradictions and ambiguities between one film or text and the next. Roy does a lot of whining and moaning about tea, and Moss does a bit of cracking the whip. 

And finally they come to the end of it, add the last detail to the last paragraph on intra-company senior zombie/junior human etiquette, and the enlightenment, the flash of insipiration that they were hoping for strikes, for Roy. But they've forgotten another detail, a concrete one of their daily lives, and he gets up to attend to that as he gabs excitedly over his shoulder to Moss. “It's the spectrum of light, Moss! It'll burn it out of them! You remember on the news footage – back when the TV stations were up and running. They were lurching over to the shadows, congregating in the dark, fast as their mangled meaty little legs could carry 'em. We need to bodge up light-ray laserguns, something powerful that's full spectrum and beyond, no time to identify exact wavelength. And who's better qualified to do it than geeks like us? We've probably got everything we need down amongst the scrap and refuse in this basement, which is pretty handy!”

And as he speaks, he opens the DOOR OF DOOM. And – hanging back carefully, not getting too close – throws a handful of meaty doggy snacks, out of a box standing open on the shelf, inwards into the server room. The gurgles and the growls that greet him are stomach-churning. And the snarls when the slobbering's done, strongly suggest disappointment, probably at the absence in the snack of some bone to crack. Or brains to slurp up.

“Now then, Richmond,” Moss calls out severely. “None of that. No bloody gratitude these days, d'you notice that, Roy? When strictly speaking we should've bashed his brains in with a baseball bat as soon as he was bitten, but out of the kindness of our hearts we chain him up in the Room of Doom instead, nice and cosy, regular meaty snacks – ”

Richmond tries to take his chain off at the roots, probably going for Roy's nice juicy throat in the absence of a near-enough Moss. It's ominous – he's bloody strong – and Roy turns the light on in the server-room to get a better look. And turns it off again quickly: because Richmond's back to ye olde Gothe stylings, and there's a smear of blood around his mouth. Presumably only from chewing his own lips, but it's very goth-appropriate, and a bit grim.

But there's something more urgent to be using time-limited lecky light on, and he turns and heads for the kettle. “Never mind that, Moss. Let's get a brew going while we still can, celebrate before we start building that laser gun, eh? You got any Hob-Nobs left in your Drawer of Mystery?”

It's the moment that he picks up the kettle that there's a wheezing, defeated electronic sigh from the server room, forced-shutdown bleeps and pings from their computers, and all the lights go out.

There's not a dicky-bird from Moss, and Roy neither. Roy stands frozen. After a moment, Moss mutters a very quiet, “Oh dear. Oh dear.” They return to silence a moment more.

Then a low humming growl starts up from the server room, again. Richmond doesn't sound resentfully denied and furious, anymore. He sounds anticipatory, excited. He sounds _hungry._

“You know, Roy,” Moss says unsteadily, “I'd just like to take this opportunity to say that I've always been very, very fond of you, and really appreciate your right-thinking approach to the question of gender re-allocation in Hobbit roleplay. And your arse. And I wish – “

“Yeah, Moss,” Roy agrees faintly. “We should probably have done something about that before now. But now...”

A slow thudding starts up, through the internal door, coming from the lift. It ratchets up, and up and a little more. And then it's fast like this is Lord of the Flies, drumming for a killing, conch passed from hand to hand, and they're both Ralph, or maybe more likely Piggy, and Jack is coming for them... 

The first moans are inchoate, indecipherable. But then there's an unmistakable, slurred-out, “Burrrainshz...” Of course there is. Of course. The first is followed by a few more, and then a host. And more and more and more.

The thrumming gets louder, the thudding, the pounding, the kicking. The centre is unstable, the barricade cannot hold.

One voice is louder than the rest, accompanied by more vicious kicks to the lift's internal door. “Braaainzzsh,” it snarls, higher than the rest, shrieky. “Brainszhh! Braaainzzsh. Braaainzzsh. Braaainzzsh braaainzzsh braaainzzsh.”

It stops for a moment, leaving the undifferentiated moans and howls of the rest to take over once more. Then it starts up again. “Shoessszh. Shoessszh. Shoessszh! Shoessszh shoessszh shoessszh. Shoessszh shoessszh shoessszh. Shoessszh! Shoessszh! _Shoessszh!_ THE SHOESSSZH!”


End file.
